Six successive generations run from Babur, the Timurid exile who won northern India at Panipat in 1526, to Aurangzeb, who died in 1707 after forty-nine years of austere rule — five parent-child links in all. In between stand four emperors, Humayun, Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan — names most people can recite and almost nobody can place in relation to one another. The tree explains why: the Mughal succession almost never passed quietly from father to eldest son. Babur's mother, the Chagatai princess Qutlugh Nigar Khanum, gave the house its 'Mughal' name; her descendants gave it a pattern of sons who rebelled and brothers who did not survive each other.
The fracture begins immediately. Humayun, born to Babur's chief wife Maham Begum, spent his reign fighting his own half-brothers Kamran, Askari and Hindal — Kamran blinded on his orders, Askari exiled, Hindal alone redeemed by dying in his defence. Humayun's son by Hamida Banu Begum, Akbar, was born in desert flight and crowned at thirteen under the regent Bairam Khan, whom he dismissed as soon as he could. Akbar's Rajput marriage to Mariam-uz-Zamani produced Jahangir; his other two sons, Murad and Daniyal, drank themselves to death before forty. Jahangir in turn rebelled against Akbar before a late reconciliation, then blinded his own eldest son Khusrau.
The Persian branch complicates the diagram usefully. Mirza Ghiyas Beg's family supplied two empresses: his daughter Nur Jahan, who married Jahangir in 1611 and effectively governed the empire, and his granddaughter Mumtaz Mahal, daughter of Asaf Khan, who married Shah Jahan and died in 1631 bearing their fourteenth child. Nur Jahan backed Shahryar for the throne; her brother Asaf Khan backed Shah Jahan, and the family split. Shah Jahan won, executed Shahryar, and reigned over the empire's aesthetic peak — until 1658, when Aurangzeb defeated Dara Shukoh at Samugarh and confined his father in Agra Fort. Dara was executed in 1659 and Murad Bakhsh in 1661, while Shah Shuja fled to Arakan and was killed or vanished there. Even the daughters divided: Jahanara for Dara, Roshanara for Aurangzeb.
This tree follows the dynasty's own historians — the Baburnama, Gulbadan Begum's Humayun-nama written at Akbar's request, and the Akbarnama and Tuzk-e-Jahangiri that succeeded them, an unusually self-documented imperial family. What they record is a repetition rather than a decline: Aurangzeb, who rose by revolt, imprisoned his son and eventual successor Muhammad Muazzam for about seven years, drove his son Muhammad Akbar into permanent exile in Persia, and jailed his poet-daughter Zeb-un-Nissa for twenty. He left no uncontested heir: within months of his death in 1707, Muazzam, now Bahadur Shah, killed his brother Azam Shah at Jajau, and the cycle closed exactly where it began.
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